When she died in 1946 at age 72, Gertrude Stein already was a bona fide icon.

For more than 50 years, the Pennsylvania-born, Oakland-bred poet, writer, art collector and playwright had been an earthshaking force in American and European artistic and literary circles.

Her writing was published extensively and blazed new, if not always popular, trails; her stage works were met with acclaim. Her vast art collection, consisting of masterpieces by painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse (both personal friends), was legendary. Stein herself, in the company of her lover, Alice B. Toklas, was the subject of essays in magazines such as Time, Life, Vogue and Vanity Fair.

Yet facets of Stein’s rich private life have not received the same level of exposure her public persona garnered.

Her arts patronage and popular Saturday evening salons, where crowds gathered to gaze at her collection of avant-garde paintings, are well known. But what did Stein’s pioneering domestic life, in which she lived openly with her female companion in an atmosphere of creative support that fueled and inspired her work, look like?

Two new exhibits — “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories,” on display through Sept. 6 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” debuting May 21 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — aim to further illuminate the life of one of the 20th century’s most significant tastemakers.

That life unfolds stunningly at the Jewish Museum, where curators have mounted an engrossing show exploring the Jewish-American writer’s career, which began in earnest after she left the East Coast for Paris, and, most movingly, her partnership with Toklas, whom Stein considered her wife, as well as her friendships with artists and intellectuals.

Using photographs, paintings, printed ephemera and some of Stein’s personal effects, the curators developed five stories, or narratives, that include Stein’s roles as muse, spouse, friend and celebrity.

“She was very influential,” says Wanda M. Corn, an art historian and retired Stanford professor who spent nearly a decade working on the exhibit.

Portrait of a life

Corn long had been interested in the writer’s musings on American artists and her role in the connections between European and American modern art.

While she knew of Stein’s famed support of painters such as Picasso and Matisse during the early, often turbulent stages of their careers, she learned more about Stein as she delved into the author’s large archives at Yale University.

There, Corn discovered Stein’s clothes. She found items such as the writer’s glasses, cocktail napkins decorated with roses and even pieces of wallpaper from her home. “It wasn’t just her manuscripts and her letters or diaries or journals, but rather all these personal domestic things,” Corn says.

The result of the curator’s research is a sympathetic portrait of a complex individual.

Photographs, paintings, drawings and sculptures depict Stein as Buddha-like, which is how artist Jacques Lipchitz, described her in his memoir. In Lipchitz’s bronze bust, Stein appears serene and resolute. In Jo Davidson’s 1927 bronze, she is meditative as she sits, enveloped in a dress, with her long hair piled high on her head. Some depictions were less flattering, such as Pavel Fyodorovitch Tchelitchew’s drawing where a cropped-haired Stein glowers, emperorlike.

There are also graceful photographs by important image-makers such as Man Ray, whom Stein considered her “official” photographer for a time, and Sir Cecil Beaton. Pictures of Toklas highlight her handsome features and fashionable dress.

The show’s most touching moments come in the second section, which explores Stein and Toklas’ idyllic life at their Paris apartment and their residence in Bilignin, France.

Viewers are treated to a series of revelatory portraits of the couple by Beaton, including a tender shot of the women in the ethereal gardens surrounding their manor home.

A small section of paintings and photographs devoted to their beloved poodle, Basket, along with shots of their house’s artful interior, brings the fanciful couple firmly back to earth.

Treasury of art

But Gertrude wasn’t the only Stein with an eye for the beautiful, SFMOMA’s “The Steins Collect” demonstrates.

That show, the first in more than 40 years to examine the Steins’ cache of art, gathers together 200 objects amassed by Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael and Michael’s wife, Sarah.

The works on display will dazzle fans of Picasso and Matisse, whom the Steins collected heavily. Frequent visitors to SFMOMA will recognize Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat,” from the permanent collection, a watershed moment in early 20th-century painting, which curator Janet Bishop says helped serve as an impetus for the exhibition. There are figurative paintings by Picasso and portraits including his famed “Portrait of Gertrude Stein,” on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — the sole painting Stein bequeathed to a public collection. Other featured artists include Paul Cezanne, Juan Gris, Pierre August Renoir and Marie Laurencin.

But what makes the Steins’ collection even more special, Bishop explains, was the family’s willingness to open the doors of their homes to let the public in.

“Not only were they willing to take risks and support the work of artists early in their careers before other people were appreciating it, but they were so committed to sharing their passion,” she says. “The fact that they established regular visiting hours in their homes on Saturday nights to accommodate the incredible demand to see their paintings — that anyone who knew someone could come and see these paintings and listen to Leo or Sarah talk about them, I think, was really extraordinary.” Their art, much like Stein’s life, was not a private pleasure.